September 8, 2008

Go ask ALICE, when she's ten feet tall

In a previous life, I spent a week at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, and my clearest memory is that the cafeteria's soda fountain dispenses the world's foulest Cote du Rhone pinot noir. But I'd blocked out even that until this weekend, when it was all over the news that CERN is firing up its 17-mile radius Large Hadron particle collider to recreate the Big Bang and either reveal the secrets of the universe or destroy it with mini black holes. Personally I'm all for balls-out science, so I vote that it's worth the risk.

Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning it here is that "the team working on one of the four major installations in the tunnel — the ALICE, or 'A Large Ion Collider Experiment' — produced a comic book featuring Carlo the physicist and a girl called Alice to explain the machine's investigation of matter a split second after the Big Bang." I've been looking all over the webs for this, but all I've found is the rap. If you turn anything up, let me know.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hows that iron clad argument against Sarah Palin coming?

Evie said...

Well, Anonymous, if that is your real name, my husband did a nice job in the comments of the previous Palin post. But anyone who is looking for a convincing argument on a blog about comic books has probably already made up their mind.

Evie said...

Btw, I assumed that because you commented anonymously you were looking to pick a fight of some kind, which I really don't like to do here (or anywhere, really)...so I apologize for my snitty tone if you were just asking genuinely :).

B.F. SkinHer said...

Oh, glad to see that I'm not the only one searching but turning up empty handed.

If you do manage to find a link, please share! We'll all just have to wait until then...

Evie said...

Yeah, I realized there must be nothing available online when more than half of my site hits today were from people searching for some combination of "carlo + alice + hadron + comic". So hopefully those folks will post something soon. If we're still alive tomorrow to see it, that is.

Anonymous said...

Oh - one more, just for you Anonymous...

Sarah Palin wants to teach creationism in schools! (To tie this into this here comics blog - I'd say this is akin to wanting to teach Crisis on Infinite Earths in History Class.)

HeyMissHeyMiss said...

high school science teacher here...I would LOVE to get a copy of that comic; all my students are eager to know more but this level of physics comprehension is beyond them (and me!) at this point...maybe later in the year?

Anonymous said...

Found the comic book after looking since the news came out. Here's a link to the PDF: http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/static/Documents/outreach/Cartoon/E_AliceBD.pdf

Enjoy.